


Aerith and Bob

by cthulhuraejepsen



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-12
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2019-03-30 07:28:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13946574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cthulhuraejepsen/pseuds/cthulhuraejepsen
Summary: Written for /r/WritingPrompts prompt: "[WP] You are born with two names tatooed on you body somewhere, one of your soulmate and one of the people that will eventually kill you. There is no way to tell who is who."





	Aerith and Bob

Aerith was a serial monogamist while she waited on her soulmate.

She'd met Bob at an interdepartmental training session on soulmate and killmates. They were both small cogs in the vast government, two individuals sitting together at the back of a lecture hall filled with equally unimportant functionaries. The session was one of the type held many times a year, with attendance of at least one of them mandatory. It was Aerith's third year in her position and Bob's second year in his, which meant that they felt comfortable passing notes instead of paying attention to the bullet points of governmental policy. When they training session was over, he asked her to lunch, and she'd said yes, because his name was written on her body, and had been since birth.

"Do you want to get the name thing out of the way first?" asked Bob after they'd found a table. Seasoned shrimp over rice for her, a burger for him.

"Haven't we already?" asked Aerith. She smiled at him. "I believe you paid me a compliment."

"I didn't mean that," said Bob, ignoring the flirtation. "I mean ... what do you know?"

"I'm the only Aerith Sunflower in the world, so far as I know," said Aerith. "Wholly by design on the part of my parents, naturally. They're mutuals, met in third grade and together ever since, and they thought that to give me the best shot at finding my soulmate, they'd give me as unique a name as possible."

"Not uncommon," said Bob. "The strategy, not the name. But I was more wondering about your, ah, status."

"Status?" asked Aerith, raising an eyebrow. "Do you think I'd be talking to you if I'd already found my soulmate?"

"I told you what I do?" asked Bob.

"You did," said Aerith. She winced slightly. "I might have forgotten, sorry, I didn't realize that we'd get to talking."

"I'm in the Department of Anomalous Results," said Bob. "Low level, but I read a lot of the reports that come through, people with one name, people with two of the same name, people with their own name, with their own name twice, a few without any names at all. Once a guy with three, but that turned out to be a hoax. Mostly I help with the pamphlets."

"I've got two names," said Aerith, holding up two slender fingers.

"Me too," said Bob.

"But what you really want to know is if one of my names is 'Bob Smith', right?" asked Aerith.

"I'd understand if you didn't want to tell me," said Bob with a nod.

"You seem like a good guy," smiled Aerith with a shrug. "But -- can you keep a secret?"

"Sure," said Bob, frowning slightly.

"Not a big secret, or a state secret, just something that we're trying to keep a little bit under wraps for as long as possible," said Aerith. "Sorry if this conversation is taking a turn on you, I do like you."

"Oh," said Bob. "Well, I -- I like you too."

"The thing is, if you have 'Aerith Sunflower' written somewhere on you, you know almost for a fact that you're either my soulmate or my killmate, right?" asked Aerith.

"But there's an asymmetry, because if I have 'Bob Smith' written on me, then I don't know whether that means you. Do you know how many Bob Smiths there are in the United Coalition?"

"No idea," said Bob. "Lots, I would assume."

"45,468," said Aerith.

"When did you look that up?" asked Bob. He cocked his head to the side. "I've been with you since we met."

"Ah, well," said Aerith. "I told you that I'm in the Coorelation Division, right?"

"Right," said Bob. He gave her a weak smile. "I didn't forget."

"Har," said Aerith. "Well, I work on something that we call the 'Bob Smith' problem."

"You literally call it that?" asked Bob.

"Literally," nodded Aerith. "You see, if you're typical and have two names on you, you don't know which one is which, right? Which one is the soulmate and which one is the killmate?"

"Uh," said Bob. "Right, I guess."

"Wrong, actually," said Aerith. "I mean, you can't ever say for certain, but there are ways of judging probability. Let's say that there are 45,468 Bob Smiths in the UC, right? The Registration Act has been in effect for long enough that we're actually able to draw conclusions from the data, even if coverage is only about two percent of the population. If there are about 50,000 people registered with the name Bob Smith on them, then we expect maybe two and a half million in the population at large."

"Is -- is that true?" asked Bob. He sat back in his chair. "Are those numbers real?"

Aerith nodded. "Yup," she said. "The really interesting thing is that the spike in 'Bob Smith' started about thirty years ago, so far as we can tell. Before then, it was at roughly what you'd expect given the prevalence of people with that name in the population."

"That means," said Bob, then stopped.

"That means that if you have the name 'Bob Smith' on you, he's far more likely to be your killmate than your soulmate," said Aerith.

"Huh," said Bob. "But," he started, then stopped. "In theory, wouldn't you expect that a single 'Bob Smith' was the cause?"

"Yes," said Aerith. "That's the Bob Smith Problem in a nutshell. We're trying to figure out what precautions are sensible to take. In a lot of ways it's similar to the 'named doctor' problem, if you're familiar with that, and patient mortality is way down since we enacted the reforms. And obviously we're not so concerned with the titular Bob Smith Problem, since that's set in stone, we're more worried about follow-along scenarios and how to proactively protect against them."

"Huh," said Bob again.

"You know, you were a much better conversationalist on paper," she said.

He smiled, a bit weakly. "Thanks for letting me know, I guess. Any idea how many years until the name Bob Smith goes down in history?"

"Nope," said Aerith. "We can make our best guesses based on the ages of the people with the name, but more data is really important." She shrugged. "In the future, we're hoping that registration is universal, which would mean that we could proactively defend against all sorts of issues. After the Mesabi City bombing it came out that one hundred and sixty-eight people working in that building had Alfred Vincent Prince's name on them, and if we'd had total data collection, or the procedures that are in place now, we would have made sure that wasn't the case, just because of what it indicated about what would happen. The noble pursuit of trying to hammer fate into shape."

"You're dancing around something," said Bob, after a little bit. "I'm struggling to figure out what it is."

Aerith rolled up her sleeve. Written there, in big bold letters, was the name, 'Bob Smith'. It sat at an angle, starting from her elbow and extending to the middle of her forearm. Bob stared at it. "The other one is 'Clive Rogers', not somewhere I can easily show. All else being equal, I think he's probably the soulmate, and 'Bob Smith' is the killmate, with me being one of his millions of victims from whatever unstoppable thing happens some years or decades in the future. And the point that I was trying to make is, what we really should do is tailor our responses to all possible worlds in an effort to make fate give us what we want from it. So it would be easy for me to say, okay, if you meet a Bob Smith, then statistically he's likely to be a killmate rather than a soulmate, so don't give him the time of day. But if I had that attitude, then it would only help to guarantee that I was killed by a Bob Smith, right? So I decided that if I met a Bob Smith, I would take a chance on him, even if he didn't have my name, because then I'd be more likely to end up not being so controlled by the same fate of everyone who's actually a part of the Bob Smith Problem. Not that I need my death to be unique, but I'd rather die in a sudden, unexpected way, rather than in a slow, looming way that casts a shadow over every day of my life."

"Huh," said Bob for the third time. "You're quite interesting, you know that?"

"I've been in Coorelation for far too long," said Aerith with a smile. "And it's only been three years."

"Aren't you burning to know whether I've got your name or not?" asked Bob. Despite what she'd said, he was smiling back.

"You said it was a pretty name," said Aerith. She ate a bite of her pasta, which had grown cold. "I didn't think that would be your reaction, if you'd seen it before."

Bob untucked his shirt and lifted it up, far enough that she could see her named, Aerith Sunflower, written to stretch from his navel to his rib. "I've thought that it was a pretty name for a long time."

Aerith beamed him a smile. "Okay," she said. "But you have to promise me that you're not going to become president and order a nuclear strike or something."

"To be honest, I'd planned to go into government at some point, after I'd worked my way up in the DAR," said Bob. "But now that I know about the Bob Smith Problem, I think maybe I should divert my attention somewhere safer. Genetic manipulation, maybe."

Aerith stared at him for a moment, then laughed, and looking back, that was when they'd say that their relationship had truly begun.


End file.
